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Mailer's novel ideas about Hitler

Not long after it first appeared in 1998, Norman Mailer read a book by Ron Rosenbaum titled Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origin of His Evil.

While the bibliography of Mailer's just released novel The Castle in the Forest lists about 150 sources, it is Rosenbaum's book above all that roused his imagination.

"Rosenbaum had interviewed about 15 authorities on the subject of Hitler," he recalls. "And I read their explanations and thought that all of them were wanting.

"After I finished reading the book – you can't be a novelist all your life without developing a certain species of arrogance – I thought, I know more about it than these folks. I began to think of writing about Hitler."

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We are talking in the office of his publisher, Random House, where a stream of journalists from the U.S., Canada and Australia have come to do interviews. A German TV crew, fascinated by new theories about Germany's national monster, stands at the ready.

Almost 84, Mailer has been investigating the dark, instinctual side of human nature since he published The Naked and the Dead in 1948, when he was 25. In truth, what draws interviewers is not the new book but the chance to see a dinosaur, a relic of a more brilliant age, a natural wonder who can produce a 468-page fiction in his ninth decade.

He has come in from Provincetown, Mass., with his sixth wife, Norris Church, a tall, ageless, willowy woman dressed dramatically in a black hat, a multi-coloured striped trapeze coat and chandelier earrings. She watches over him protectively.

Church met Mailer in Arkansas three decades ago when she asked him to sign a book. She'san artist and writer, and the mother of two of his sons. In August, Random House will publish her second novel, Cheap Diamonds.

Mailer apologizes for remaining seated. His knees have given out and he walks with two canes. His memory falters: he cannot remember being in Toronto, though this reporter heard him read at Convocation Hall in 1988.

Yet, though his body is oddly shrunken, there is no diminution of his fierce intelligence. The bright blue eyes twinkle, his voice is confident.

When asked whether there has not already been a surfeit of books about Hitler, he replies: "If you have something to say that others haven't said, it doesn't matter how much else has been written. I do think there has never been another book quite like this one."

A blend of fact and fiction, The Castle in the Forest describes Hitler's tangled parentage with its possible incestuous connections; his birth to Klara and Alois Hitler; his weaning, toilet training, schooling, childhood games; his masturbation, love of his mother and sister; and his fear of his father, a customs officer who takes up beekeeping in retirement. We leave not very interesting boy "Adi" at 17, after he wipes his behind with his school diploma while drunk.

Mailer's explanation of why the young Adolf accumulated cruelty and hubris in his makeup turns out to be centuries out of date: the Devil made him do it.

The novel is narrated by "Dieter," an SS man who is working for "the Maestro," as the author calls Satan. The Maestro had inserted himself into Adi's soul, and it had been Dieter's assignment to keep an eye on the boy and make sure he grew up crooked and sacrilegious.

Does Mailer actually believe this? "I'm a novelist," Mailer says. "I don't deal with certainties. To me the possibility is very great that there is a Satanic presence in human affairs."

He is as fascinated with scatology in the novel as he is with the Devil, and describes Hitler's potty training in detail.

"Why is everyone annoyed at that? The publisher at Random House wanted me to take out all that stuff, but it's fundamental. I have eight children (I'm father of nine, including an adopted son) and if you have raised eight babies you are not going to pretend that s--t never entered your recognizance."

The objection, however, is not to the potty contents, but the discredited Freudian view that it has something to do with shaping character.

"It has never been disproved," he says. "A novelist doesn't need proof, only to know that something is possible."

Mailer's 36 books have blasted away the taboos against writing frankly about the body in serious literature. He tried to write his World War II novel The Naked and the Dead in the brutal language of soldiers faced with death but, in 1948, his publisher insisted he write "fug" for the ultimate expletive.

"Now I get so tired of hearing f--k. It was once a wonderful word and now it's totally used up," he says.

He has lived to see literary fiction devolve from the mainstream art form it once was. "People used to read novels to learn more about life. Now they turn on the TV – it's what people talk about at dinner parties, not books. It's painful to watch your profession diminish."

Still, the old lion can roar, especially when wounded. Of all the reviews his late work has elicited, none have stung him more than negative notices from Michiko Kakutani, the influential critic of the New York Times. She called his novel about Jesus, The Gospel According to the Son (1997), "a silly and self-important book" that makes the Saviour sound "like a guest on Oprah." His 1995 book Oswald's Tale about JFK's assassin, she wrote, "succeeds in simultaneously being boring and presumptuous, derivative and solipsistic."

His compilation of fiction and non-fiction excerpts The Time of Our Time (1998), she wrote, vacillates "between the bravura and the boneheaded."

"She's dissed Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon – she hates major American novelists who are male," Mailer says. Kakutani did not review The Castle in the Forest.

"For a good reason," he says with relish. "I was interviewed in Esquire and I said `I don't know why she dislikes me so much. What put the hair up her royal Japanese ass?' And that was put into print and then it turned out she was disqualified from reviewing me because the Times has a policy that none of their reviewers can review someone who is either a friend or an enemy."

It may be that Mailer's reputation rests most securely on his great non-fiction works such as Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song (1979), in which his gifts as a social and political observer were in full play.

Of the U.S. today, he says that George Bush is "the most ignorant president in my lifetime." He would like to see Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama jointly on the Democratic ticket.

He has no plans to write non-fiction again. "If I do anything now, it will be a continuation of this (Hitler) novel. I used to write 10 hours a day; now I can do three or four in the afternoon. Any day you can work is a blessing."

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